Tenant-Side Management of Service Function Chaining: Architecture, Implementation and Experiment on a Future Internet Testbed

The adoption of Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networking technologies allow network infrastructure operator flexibly orchestrating resources to provide tenants with their own virtual network. However, access to computing and network resource management APIs is typically allowed only within the infrastructure domain and rarely disclosed to tenants for security and performance reasons. This may severely limit tenants capability in coping with demands of application-tailored network services, including Service Function Chaining (SFC). While the literature extensively addressed the challenges of SFC in the infrastructure domain, tenant-side SFC management is quite unexplored yet, although discussed also by a standardization group. This work proposes an SFC platform (called SFCLola) providing tenants with a latency-aware SFC management while minimizing support required from infrastructure operators. The platform encompasses two main levels: an end-to-end chain management level featuring a VNF selection algorithm and a forwarding mechanism that can be programmed and enforced within the tenant network of VMs without requiring access to the switches at the network infrastructure data plane. SFCLola has been implemented as software prototype and experimentally evaluated on a multi-DC infrastructure provided by the 5GINFIRE project.